Linguistic Dimensions of Sexual Normativity

Project Information

LIDISNO

Grant agreement ID: 740257

DOI

10.3030/740257

Project closed

EC signature date 6 March 2017

Start date 1 November 2017

End date 31 October 2020

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 239 860,80

EU contribution

€ 239 860,80

Coordinated by

JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE-UNIVERSITAET FRANKFURT AM MAIN
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - LIDISNO (Linguistic Dimensions of Sexual Normativity)

Reporting period: 2019-11-01 to 2020-10-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

LIDISNO (Linguistic Dimensions of Sexual Normativity), is a language and sexuality research project carried out at Florida Atlantic University and Goethe-University Frankfurt. It seeks to study how shifts in sexual norms are associated with changes in linguistic practices and thus to present an empirical basis for the development of normativity as an analytical concept in (sexuality-related) critical discourse studies. For this purpose, LIDISNO studies the linguistic effects of three sexuality-related normative shifts from different time periods through historical comparative analyses of linguistic corpus data.
The project seeks to address the following overarching research questions:
1. How is language involved in sexual normativity formation?
2. How do sexuality-related normative shifts influence the way language is used to talk or write about sexuality?
3. Which consequences do the findings have for gender-/sexuality-related language policies?
Conclusions
Language use is a central discursive medium where the way sexuality is conceptualized in a given culture and time period surfaces. It is the place where social negotiations are carried out about what is deemed good, normal and preferred or bad, abnormal and marginalized in terms of sexuality. Corpus linguistic techniques can be used to detect such sexuality-related discourses, with quantitative types of analysis often providing insights on descriptively based normativities (“what many people do”) and qualitative types of analysis being well equipped for the investigation of prescriptive normativities (“what people should do”) and the local enactment of non-normativities.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Year 1: The first part of the project dealt with the question how a coming out shapes the way we communicate about a person and used the public coming out of US Latino pop star Ricky Martin as a case study. The researcher carried out a corpus linguistic study of news reports on Ricky Martin.
Results: The study showed that, while the singer’s ethnicity was strongly foregrounded in the news reports dating from the time before the coming out, sexual identity has become the central orientation point for the news coverage after the coming out. This attests to a subtractive relationship of the two identity facets and to a shift from the discursive construction of a desire-focused Latin lover persona to a homonormative construction of Martin as a gay man whose identity revolves around domesticity and consumption rather than sexual desire.
Year 2: The second part of the project focused on discursive shifts connected to the Stonewall Riots (1969) as a central event of LGBT liberation. US gay men’s pre-Stonewall life narratives were studied using a corpus linguistic methodology. A linguistic landscape analysis of the homonormative space of Wilton Drive in Wilton Manors, Florida, complemented the analysis.
Results: The study attests to the central role of the early LGBT movement (Stonewall), not just for gay liberation, but also for a development that has promoted our conceptualization of sexuality in terms of identities. While same-sex sexualities were discursively constructed as pathological and/or criminal before Stonewall (even by men who experience same-sex attraction themselves), their treatment in post-Stonewall times shows a stronger connection to affirmative gay identity discourses that treat same-sex sexualities as legitimate in their own right.
Year 3: The third part of the project set out to see whether the desire-identity shift in the conceptualization of sexuality, as famously proposed by Foucault, can be empirically verified using actual language data. Various corpus linguistic analyses were employed to compare two corpora of sexuality-related Anglo-American prose literature dating from 1830-1899 and 1900-1969.
Results: The analyses suggest that the desire-identity shift in the conceptualization of sexuality was not really in effect at the turn of the 20th century, when medical scholars created the terms “heterosexual” and “homosexual”. Even though the creation of these terms may have paved the way for an identity-related conceptualization, the language data analyzed in LIDISNO indicate that such a conceptualization was for a fairly long time restricted to medical discussions of sexuality, while everyday language use did not follow suit until the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Exploitation and dissemination of the results: 6 journal articles, 1 handbook article, one more article under review, book proposal, book manuscript being completed, presentations at international conferences and workshops, project website: https://quinguistics.de/9-0-LIDISNO.html

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

This research has highlighted how language is involved in the discursive construction of sexual normativity and how corpus linguistic techniques can be used to analyze such discourses. The three sexuality-related normative shifts studied have been shown to have a substantial impact on the way we use language to communicate about sexuality. In year 1, it was shown that the language used by news media to report on Latino pop star Ricky Martin before and after his coming out as a gay man pays witness to shifts in which aspects are treated as salient in the artist’s persona. One central finding is that ethnicity is pushed to the background after the artist’s coming out as gay, while sexuality is suddenly treated as the central representational issue. In year 2, we saw substantial linguistic shifts in the way gay men narrate their pre-Stonewall life experiences. Within the conceptual domain of sexuality, the narratives created before Stonewall draw more frequently on terminology from the semantic domains “sexual practices”, “sexual desire”, “sexual relationship”, and “body”, while these are almost completely absent in the keyword list of the narratives produced after Stonewall. Sexual identity vocabulary is common in both corpora, but there are qualitative differences (relation to normality, pathology, gender identity in PRE; positive, affirmative sexual identity labels in POST). The connection of sexual identity to the notion of an identity-based community is specific to the keyword list of the narratives created after Stonewall. Finally in year 3, we saw that the desire-identity shift proposed by Foucault does not surface in sexuality-related language use around the turn of the 20the century, which suggests that a wider social infiltration of an identity conceptualization was not yet in effect at that time and surfaced considerably later, supported by the efforts of the early gay rights movement.
The work carried out in year 1 to 3 has improved our understanding of how language is involved in the discursive construction of sexual normativities and thus has wider societal implications. Based on these insights, it is possible to formulate guidelines for non-heteronormative language use that are sensitive to the way linguistic choices shape which messages we convey about sexuality and sexual normativity. This is likely to create an awareness of how language use is involved in the normative construction of non-heterosexual identities and thus can lead to recommendations on how to avoid discursive processes of stigmatization, discrimination and exclusion in public language use.

Tables 3 and 4

Table 1